It looks like cheating doesn’t pay, and Valve is out to prove it in Counter-Strike 2. In its first set of patch notes, Valve doesn’t mince words; it’s banning cheaters and penalizing parties caught benefiting from their activities.
As noted by IGN, Counter-Strike 2 cheaters risk more than just their own in-game freedom. Valve’s update warns that when multiple people are caught cheating, players partied with them risk their own account status. The patch notes read:
“When one or more party members get convicted of cheating and permanently banned, all their associates will be penalized with loss of Profile Rank and CS Rating”.
In addition to the cheater-by-association ban, the patch notes target folks hoping to piggyback their way through player rankings with higher-skilled friends. “In Premier, players with a very high established CS Rating are not allowed to party with accounts that do not have an established CS Rating.”
It seems this is part of Valve’s latest solution to address the lengthy history of cheating in the Counter-Strike community, though the CS2 developer doesn’t really explain why or how you’ll get flagged as an associate. The company implemented its first iterations of Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) back in 2002 and tuned the system into a cheat-seeking missle over the last decade.
These are but some of the changes, improvements, and bug fixes found in the first wave of Counter-Strike 2 updates. Valve, in very Valve behavior, launched Counter-Strike 2 at 4:40 p.m. ET on a Wednesday, officially retiring CS:GO.
